I am going to provide a few steps on starting a business, this being the first article. Since these processes are fresh in my memory, I am documenting what I have accomplished to try and make it easier for you to start your own web company. Of course, if you have any comments or suggestions, feel free to let me know. I will only provide a bit of information at a time so you can research the material in small chunks. Finding your Niche Market. Write down a list of business ideas related to popular items you see when you walk around the mall or retail stores, what ads you see in magazines and what...

Call this a Guide to iMarketing in 2007. There are a lot of new technologies out there such as blogging, podcasting, social bookmarking and networking, search engine optimization, internet marketing and web2.0. I have been researching these technologies about 40 hours a week this summer to understand how everything fits together. Now, I want to share what I compiled. It’s a basic laundry list and doesn’t go very in depth, but there are a lot of excellent resources in this guide. If anyone has anything to add, please comment! I. Website ad planning, placement, and analytics: A. Conducting...

I have written a few articles on CodeIgniter now because it truly has changed the way I develop websites. It has cut the development time in at least half, preventing redundant work by providing great built-in features that I can use in every one of my projects. Plus, CodeIgniter is so easy to pick up. You can start building CI apps in about 10 minutes after watching the CI tutorials and reading my tutorial on getting set up. If you are new to Object Oriented Programming, you can read my introduction to OOP also. The way CodeIgniter keeps you organized is this: It keeps everything separate and...

CodeIgniter is great because you can separate your content from your styling with controllers, models, and views. Another great thing is when you create a website with CI, you automatically use friendly URLs (if you use an .htaccess file). If you have a bunch of unrelated pages however, you might wonder how you can keep those URLs as tiny as possible without having thirty different controllers for each page. For example, I have a CI application with a home controller that has about 20 different functions inside of it. To access each one of these functions, I would normally visit http://localhost/home/contact...

This looks like it will be good. The challenge starts on Wednesday, August 1st, 2007. So far, I have learned about some great new tools for your website, some I haven’t even heard of before. If you haven’t already, sign up now! Catch up on the blogs, podcasts, video podcasts, and do a little research on the websites he mentions in the videos such as Facebook, Technorati, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg, delicious, and Flickr. I don’t know how to use every one of them to their full advantage, but I think everyone’s in for a treat on Wednesday! Thirty Day Challenge Sign Up

CodeIgniter is an awesome tool if you want to learn PHP or start to use object oriented programming (OOP) with your new website. CodeIgniter is flexible with a small footprint and offers tons of features already built in, such as session management, active record use with mysql databases. The best part is it lets you use Model-View-Controller (MVC) programming. This way, your styling (view) is separate from your content (generated by controller) and lets you manipulate your raw data with a model. There are two awesome video tutorials on CodeIgniter to show you how powerful and easy CodeIgniter...

A short but sweet list of guidelines to follow while building a web 2.0 website. Learn XHTML. Make sure your pages are XHTML transitional or strict. This will help with your visibility to search engines and cross-browser compatibility. XHTML Tutorial by W3Schools Learn CSS. With CSS, you can start separating content from appearance and CSS is more cross browser friendly than tables. One thing to avoid while programming with CSS is to use too many nested divs. If you start using too many, it’s kind of pointless to start using CSS rather than tables in the first place. If you are just...